Mark This! Podcast, Episode 14, Eat to Excel
Host: Heather Dotchel, Corporate Communications
Guests: Kelli Sheehan, Director of Business Development, Aramark Collegiate Hospitality; Kaiten Zajac, RD, Senior Manager of Nutrition, Aramark Collegiate Hospitality; Dan Wainfan, Vice President for Health, Wellness & Nutrition, Aramark
It is time to Mark This!, a podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs, and projects that are happening all over Aramark's varied lines of business. I'm Heather Dotchel. As a member of Aramark's Communications team, I see and hear amazing things that are happening across our company every day. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them building opportunity, building innovation, and building community. I'm really excited about today's conversation. We are going to talk about Collegiate Hospitality's brand-new program, Eat to Excel. Eat to Excel is a performance-based dining platform designed to help student athletes reach for their potential on and off the field. Created with Division II and III athletes in mind, Eat to Excel provides an educational menu and nutrition tracking solution for campuses that do not have dedicated training tables for student athletes.
Joining me are three of the team members who worked on this project. From Collegiate Hospitality, we have Kelli Sheehan, Director of Business Development and registered dietician, Kaiten Zajac, Senior Manager of Nutrition. We are also joined by Dan Wainfan, Vice President for Health, Wellness, and Nutrition for Aramark. Welcome all three of you to Mark This!. Kelli, what's your role in Collegiate Hospitality?
Hi, and thank you, Heather. My role in Collegiate Hospitality is Director of Business Development. Basically, I do new sales for the Midwest region here. And with that, it's been great because I am able to sit and learn from so many of our prospective clients about what they're looking for and help customize solutions in order to solve their pain points on campus.
Kaiten, what do you do as Senior Manager of Nutrition?
That's an excellent question and I feel like my answer changes all the time because ultimately I wear many hats. But to sum it up, I provide health and wellness and food safety oversight for multiple campuses in the Midwest region. And I also get to help support some broader company projects outside of those campuses as well. I do all kinds of fun student engagement events, but I also get to help support students individually as well, to find foods that they're looking for on campuses. I help our teams improve our operations by giving a different perspective on menus and programming to help fit a diverse student population.
Dan, what does your role look like in the enterprise? You work with Aramark as an umbrella, not just Collegiate Hospitality.
That's right, Heather. As our lead for Health, Wellness, and Nutrition, my role is really to help create, and then maybe even more importantly, to bring to life, industry leading health and well-being programs. And those are for our clients and for everyone who visits the locations that we manage every day. And we are just so lucky at Aramark because we have some of the most knowledgeable and talented dieticians and chefs in the country. And in my role, I get to work with them and also many other experts to create programs that just help people live healthier lives.
And Eat to Excel is a great example of how our team of experts works together. With Eat to Excel, we've got dieticians and chefs, and they saw a need to create a dining program that was specifically designed to support student athletes. So they came up with the idea of Eat to Excel, and they tested it out locally. Then they reached out to me and others to help bring it to life nationally.
First, let's start with the obvious. Kelli, what exactly, in a nutshell, is Eat to Excel? If you would, please walk us through what it is and how students access the program?
Sure. I would love to do that, Heather. In a nutshell, Eat to Excel is a training table that's right in the residential dining facility and is accessible by all students. Most training tables are only accessible by student athletes, so this really is a big differentiator in the two types of programs. Approved foods are identified through icons displayed at each residential dining facility station. It's supplemented with a retail program in our C-store where student athletes can find Eat to Excel icons that say, "Eat to Excel preferred." right there on the displays. So they know the proper items to pick when they're on the go. We also have catering options for home and away games, and an amazing app, which is integrated with our menu system, specific to each institution where students can track their food, hydration, and activity.
Kaiten, let's turn to you since Kelli called your dietary expertise out. Can you explain how this program uses the established dining programs at campuses to create this nutritional support for the athletes?
Of course. So the program, as it's been mentioned before, really uses the existing dining hall instead of a traditional training table. Not every campus has that dedicated facility. So we've developed a program to run out of the locations that are already feeding everyone. With a few adjustments to our menus and the right nutrition education components, we're helping students to learn how to fuel their bodies properly for their training schedules to help maximize their athletic potential. With this, we really have a focus on whole muscle protein options, carbohydrates, and your fruits and vegetables, or your colors of your plate. So you teach them how to alter these different components based off their training schedules to meet whether they are having a really intense training day, they're going into a sporting event, or if they are just having a recovery day in their training schedule.
So kind of a bunch of different components with what Kelli said with the app, they can log it all in there and it kind of just builds off of each other. With all of that, the students are able to track their progress and log things in the app, like Kelli mentioned. It gives them customized nutrition goals and everything like that. So we're not really doing too much outside of it. We're just kind of building on what we already have and helping them find the foods and the locations that they're already eating at.
That makes sense and is a great way to integrate it into the campus as is. Dan, you touched upon this a little bit in your introduction, but I want to dig in with a bit more detail. So one of Aramark's strengths is its cross-functional working groups. So when we have a concept like this, there are many hands both within the line of business and without, that are making it the best that it can be. What is your role with this program and how does it tie into company priorities?
Well, it's interesting. And as Kelli and Kaiten mentioned, Eat to Excel is laser-focused on empowering the student athlete, first of all. But Eat to Excel really also totally aligns with our bigger picture health and wellbeing priorities. And so if you look at our overall health and wellness approach, it really starts with an understanding that people's relationships with food is changing. And people, even beyond athletes, just have a much greater knowledge about the role of food in their lives. And people are understanding better than ever that what you eat directly impacts the energy and the focus that you need to succeed. And more and more, they're getting that healthy food and other healthy lifestyle habits are key to their success. And there's also a growing understanding that personal health isn't just about clinical health anymore. It's more about holistic health and overall wellbeing, and that's true for athletes and non-athletes alike.
So while Eat to Excel focuses on the student athlete, it's part of a much broader suite of health and well-being programs that we have for all students, and that includes many students who may never step foot on an athletic field to compete. And we see our overall goal being to really help support a culture of health and well-being. And that's across the entire campus. And we have a really important role to play. We're here to help students discover that healthy food and beyond the healthy food, all the many other healthy habits and choices that they make every day can really help them accomplish their goals. Both helping them feel better and also to do better. And for Eat to Excel and the student athlete, that means optimizing their training and recovery and preparing for competition as well. But for our other health and well-being programs, that means supporting the physical and the emotional well-being of all students across the entire campus.
And also, you also asked Heather, about all the other people involved, and I did want to touch on that just a little bit because programs like Eat to Excel have lots of moving pieces. And for every program component, there's an Aramark expert behind the scenes on the team helping to build the individual pieces. And then we all worked together to combine them into this seamless package. And for example, Eat to Excel started with this, I think Kaiten and Kelli mentioned this, a tailored nutrition strategy for student athletes. And that was created by our Collegiate Hospitality dieticians. And then our chefs came in and built on the dietician's expertise, and they went to work creating the recipes and the menus that delivered the right combination of everything Kaiten talked about; protein, carbs, plant-based nutrients. Then what happened is our extended development teams came in, that includes communications experts, and program development specialists, and digital experts, and they all came together to build this truly integrated Eat to Excel platform.
And that's why Eat to Excel has all the great things in it that Kelli and Kaiten talked about. And as well as this whole range of communication support to make it easy for us to communicate with students, and campus leaders, and athletic directors, and coaching staff, and everybody who needs to hear about it. And so I like to think about building a program like this as really a team sport. And our development leaders actually work together like a coaching staff. They all coordinate all the different players on the team, and then our extended team of associates at our pilot locations, they work together to test and learn and provide us feedback, so we can optimize the program before we expand it.
Kaiten, you've worked with several of our pilot accounts who launched this unique program last spring. What did the students say who participated in Eat to Excel?
The students are really excited about it, especially these days being in the health and wellness space with the prevalence of social media. There's a lot of information out there and people are becoming increasingly aware of the ways that foods we eat impact our bodies. The students at our pilot accounts are on campuses that don't have the same resources as these big Division I schools. So for them to see that we're investing in them as well is huge. They have a passion for their sports, and you can really see that when you talk to them. They know that eating well would help them, but they're not really sure where to start. So when they see what this program has to offer, they get really excited about it.
And it's not just the students that have this excitement, but I've had a few coaches come up to me recently that expressed that they were pleasantly surprised at how their athletes' eating habits have changed because they're trying to hit their targets. So ultimately, we know that it's working. The whole purpose behind this program is to push and challenge these athletes in different ways and help them achieve their goals. There's a lot of excitement around it on campuses, which is really awesome.
Dan, I'd like to talk a little bit more about intended use of this program. While we had Division II and III athletes in mind when we developed it, Eat to Excel can be used by any and all student athletes. But if you would, can you please explain exactly who this is intended for and how it's different from just general menu and nutrition guidance?
Well, it's interesting, and I'm going to expand a little bit on what Kaiten was talking about. And I just have to comment that the enthusiasm that she talked about, and the excitement, is contagious. I think all of the team could feel it from the students and the coaches where Eat to Excel was piloted. And to answer your question, I see Eat to Excel as a game changer. Because what it's doing is it's bringing training table resources to campuses that just didn't have access to programs like this before. So as mentioned, traditionally, this kind of program could only be found on Division I athletic campuses. And so the unique thing here is that Eat to Excel, it's bringing all of the value-added elements together, but with Division II and III campuses in mind. But nonetheless, Eat to Excel works for athletic programs, whether they're large or small. However large the campus, the fact is that proper nutrition is absolutely critical to power athletic success. And that's true for any and all levels of competition.
So the way the extended group designed to Eat to Excel, it's intended to be used by all student athletes to help them use tailored nutrition to unlock their personal potential. And that really adds a lot of value to campuses large and small. One thing I might add, and it's really just a thought, and this is more of a sound bite to add to what Kaiten talked about earlier about how students and coaches reacted, student athletes. What I want to say really, is that knowledge is power for the student athlete. And what this program does is it builds understanding, it builds knowledge, and that enables the student athlete to change how they fuel their performance.
And so the program in itself is designed to help them find the food that meets their nutritional needs, but it's the knowledge that provides them that power. And then when you think about everything that Kaiten talked about, as athletes dive into the Eat to Excel program, they get a better understanding of how to focus on whether it's macro or micronutrients. They get a better understanding of how they need to feed their bodies and how that will fuel their performance. Whether that's carbs as the main source of fuel, or protein for muscle growth, or micronutrients from fruits and veggies to help in exercise recovery and immune health. Everything that Kaiten and our other Collegiate Hospitality dieticians, all that nutritional expertise that they have, is really distilled in a way that the collegiate athlete can absorb it and then have it impact their lives and their athletic performance. And that's one of the wonderful things about the program.
Would you like to know more about Collegiate Hospitality's Eat to Excel program? Visit our newsroom at aramark.com to access more information. Kelli, Kaiten, Dan, thank you so much for joining us today to explain this new offering. And thank you as always for tuning in to Mark This!.
